Kat’s wide eyes narrow as she takes it in. “What’s wrong with it?”
I point to the feather.
“That’s weird?”
Nana taps the photo. “Witches use quills to put spells on paper. Very easy to transfer potions and magic that way. What this implies is that a man put the curse on the photo, which is impossible.”
Kat sits in the chair. “It is?”
I plop down next to her, hating that I can’t express how seriously messed up this is. Nana is acting way too calm for Kat to understand that we’re in a situation I’ve never heard of in all of witchcraft. And clearly Nana hasn’t heard of it either, which is the scariest thing of all.
“Men cannot use magic,” she says. “This image is either false, or it destroys everything known about our world. And unfortunately, I’m inclined to believe the latter.”
“Why? It could be a fake. Or maybe a woman who is really burly?” Kat looks to me for reassurance, but I can’t give her any.
Nana heaves a sigh. “What with the unknown nature of the Curse, it would make sense for it to be something this evil and perverted. A man wielding the darkness? Heaven help us all. I have never felt so out of my depth. What can we do against something we have no knowledge of?”
I grab a pad of paper from her desk and scribble out, How did he get magic?
“I wish I knew, dear. I wish I knew. Since men cannot absorb and carry magic like we can, I am at a total loss as to how this man obtained his abilities. But from what we’ve experienced, it must have been by very dark means.”
I put my head in my hands. When we set out to defend ourselves and find Mom’s killer, I figured we’d discover some evil witch with a taste for blood or a score to settle. Not this. How in the world are we supposed to fight now? We barely know what we’re dealing with, let alone how to get rid of it. And whoever this man is, he has even more reason to kill us now that we know men are probably behind the Curse.
Then I catch sight of my mother’s picture, and my heart aches. I take it from where it hangs, my hands shaking. She’s so young—maybe even my age. She sits at a café table, wearing a sundress and smiling as if she’s madly in love. I wonder if my dad took this picture, and if so, how it got into the wrong hands.
I can’t stop fighting. I have to know who would go to such lengths to ruin our lives. And if at all possible, find a way to end it.
We need help. We need to tell other families, I write.
Nana purses her lips. “It’s hard to know who to trust. He had to have gotten the magic from somewhere, and the most likely is a someone. If we inform the wrong people we could be in worse trouble.”
“But . . .” Kat trails off, clearly feeling out of place.
“Go on,” Nana says softly. The way she respects Kat makes me smile, though it also makes me nervous.
“There must be some families you do trust, and if the Curse impacts them they deserve to know.”
“This is true.” Nana smiles. “The Curse has followed us for generations—he can’t be the first man to wield magic. Witches are secretive, and perhaps these men have kept their existence from us as well.” She stands. “The histories. I will ask our most trusted friends to scour their histories for anything. You two will read our own. It’s been so long since I have read them, and I may have forgotten a vital detail.”
I nod, even though reading the histories is no easy task. Kat seems excited by the idea, but she has no idea what we’re up against.
FIFTEEN
With the mute thing I’m dealing with, going up to the attic to read histories would be suicide. Every witch in every family must keep a history, which is a fancy word for a diary. It’s important to know our past, but of course we don’t want other people knowing. This makes the histories a labyrinth of danger, frustration, and, admittedly, more than a giant’s share of teenage angst that spans centuries. Of all the places in our house, it’s the most protected with magic.
It’d be hard enough to watch Kat and disarm all the trap spells with a voice. The books will have to wait until I’m better, so I take Kat with me for another task: translating
“Come in!” my dad says before I knock on the door. He sure has the house’s creaks down.
“Hi, Mr. Johnson,” Kat says.
His eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, hello. I thought it would be Jo.”
“She’s here. But she can’t talk, since she used her voice to get rid of a spell on that letter you had.” Kat takes the desk chair while I stand by the bed, hesitating. “She’s about to sit next to you, if you couldn’t tell.”
“Okay.”
I sit with my notebook, scribble out a question, and hand it over to Kat. “She wants to know if you recognized the picture that the location was written on.”
“Oh, yeah.” He puts his hand to his mouth, the memories seeming to flash across his face. “That was the day I met Carmina, actually. My friends and I knew her roommates. She had just moved to the Bay Area, and we all went up to San Fran to show her the city. The second I saw her . . .” His smile has so much pain behind it, pain I’m very familiar with. “It was over.”
Maybe it’s good I can’t talk, because I’d sound all weepy. I write another question and Kat reads it. “Do you know who took the picture?”
“It had to be one of her roommates, because I recognize the setting, but me and my friends didn’t have a camera that day. They were taking pictures at some point, though. I remember her posing.” He sighs. “That was over twenty years ago. We were in college then, and she moved around a couple times before we lived together. . . .”
I tilt my head. They lived together? Wow. Nana was serious when she said my mom stayed with him as long as she could. “Her roommates were Eva, Taiko, and . . . Stacia.”
Last names? I write, and Kat repeats.
He laughs. “I remember Eva’s because it was Corona, and we’d tease her about it. Taiko’s was something long and Hawaiian. She was from Maui. And Stacia’s was Black—she and Carmina were really close.”
I jump at the name. Black. They’re the largest witching family around. Not that any of our families are super big, but they have cousins and that seems huge to me. I haven’t met any of them since I was a little girl, because Nana basically cut off all contact with other families once my mom was Cursed. But Mom loved to tell the story of how we once went to a big Halloween gala when I was four. Every other little girl was a Black. One of them, a snotty redhead with perfect ringlets, said, “Hemlock? I’ve never heard of that bloodline. Are you sure you’re a witch?”
I scowled at her. “Of course I am.”
“Prove it.”
“Fine.” I cut off one of her curls and turned it into a butterfly. She wasn’t very happy about that. Mom told me that we might be a small family, but our magic was still as strong as anyone else’s.
But maybe not all the Blacks were like that little redhead. Stacia Black could have been a lovely person. And it makes sense that Mom would bunk with at least one witch, especially if she was so far from home. If Stacia is a witch and knew Mom back then, then Stacia probably has information we’re missing, information Mom wouldn’t have told my dad.
“What, Jo?” Kat asks.
I grab the pen and paper. Black is a witch family name. Stacia could have been a witch, and maybe that could be a lead.